(This is the second post in the series… the first one When to Hire your first Chief Customer Officer is here) I mentioned in an earlier post that few startups begin with a full-time Chief Customer Officer and the likely scenario is to promote someone from within the service organization to that role. It’s possible that the person who takes on the CCO role will be ideal for the job, but often startups end up searching for someone outside the organization to lead the customer success team. Either way, promoting from within or hiring from outside, there are several telltale characteristics that great Chief Customer Officers share, and there are three things they do particularly well. First, the CCO is…
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Chief Customer Officer
When to Hire a Chief Customer Officer
(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CCOs) Very few startups start life with a Chief Customer Officer, even though customers are the lifeblood of every startup; instead, you’ll likely start your customer service organization with a “jack of all trades” account manager position. You’ll have one person who handles all customer issues from basic support all the way through to true customer success. Sometimes these functions will be handled by the product team but most often they are handled by a customer service team. Specialized roles and multiple teams (e.g, support vs. professional services) with their own managers can emerge quickly in the life of a startup and these roles will usually come before a full-time CCO,…
Five Misperceptions of the CCO Role
This post was inspired by Startup CXO and was originally published by Techstars on The Line. If you’re new to the Chief Customer Officer role, we’d like to share some advice we wish we had learned earlier in our careers. There are a few common misconceptions about customers and the service organization. If you don’t realize these as misperceptions, you can spend a lot of time dealing with issues that are not real, but perceived. We have identified five of these common misperceptions, although we are sure there are more. Misperception #1: The service organization fully controls churn (customer attrition) In a lot of organizations you’ll see the service organization be measured solely on customer churn. If you really think about…